rEFIt was great for Mac's and booting to Linux, back when I worked with them. I go the bios boot route at home, one drive with an MBR Linux partition and the other with Win8 UEFI. I'm in Linux most of the time, so it's not a big time killer, but maybe someday I'll look at the new fork of rEFIt, thanks for mentioning this, and glad to hear it worked out so well for you (the new bios firmware is a headache for most of us). -- Jeremy MountainJohnson Jeremy.MountainJohnson at gmail.com On Fri, Feb 6, 2015 at 9:14 AM, Kenneth Lynes <kenlynes at usa.net> wrote: > Hi guys, > I was recently putting ubuntu 14.10 on a hp 2000 laptop and making it dual > boot with the current win 8 on the machine. > I got the linux disk to boot live by changing the boot order in bios without > too much difficulty. I think I might have had to enable legacy boot first, but > I cant recall right now. > Then the problems began. I installed using the built in method from the disk > so I did not do the partitioning myself. > > Linux installed ok, but it was necessary to interupt the boot using the escape > key (I found this method on line when searching for a solution) and then hit > the F10 key to get to the boot menu option. Then you hit F9 and choose to boot > from the hdd. Then you get to the grub menu and can choose your os. > > Unfortunately you have to do this method on every re-boot of the computer in > order to get into the grub menu. If you are not prompt with the esc key you > will boot right into win 8. > > So, I found the program made by Roderick Smith called ReFind and went through > the method suggested to get it from the repository and install it in the linux > os I had installed. I then ran the program and all went really well. > > Afterwards when you reboot the computer or start it from being off, you get > the menu which ReFind installs for you and you can choose which os to boot > up. > > I dont know how many others are having issues installing ubuntu or other linux > distros alongside of win 8 on one of these Bill Gates computers from hell, but > this should help. > I donated to his site and I think it is worth it. > I will try this program on any of the UEFI machines I confront with how to get > linux installed as an equal along side of Mr Gates os's. > > As a side note, I had wondered what would take place if I had just simply > overwrote win 8 and made the computer entirely linux. I am not sure it would > boot up without doing something else to make the bios UEFI secure boot see the > hdd. It is supposed to look at all the secure boot list first and then go to > the legacy boot list where the hdd is listed as one of the boot items. > > I hope I have explained what I did properly. This program or something like it > should be in every linux distro in my opinion. > BTW the ReFind program replaced or improved the earlier one called REFit.. > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list